Happy Last Friday of 2022! I hope you had a lovely Christmas and are enjoying this week between Christmas Day and New Year’s Day. Our Christmas featured abundant pretty snow, full health, and a child who was very happy with her gifts. Overall, it was a very good holiday for us despite the challenges produced by the abundant snow.

Usually this week is full of hard work and preparing for the new year. I started off a few days like that and then my brain and body just said – nope. It’s like they took a vote and decided that they were not participating this year in the big push between holidays. So it’s been a fairly unproductive week for me from that standpoint. More on that below.

This Week’s Artwork

Today’s artwork is The Little Gleaner by William Powell Frith and Thomas Creswick (oil on canvas, circa 1850). It is an English painting featuring the Scottish mountains.

About Firth from Infogalactic:

William Powell Frith RA (1819 – 1909) was an English painter specialising in genre subjects and panoramic narrative works of life in the Victorian era. He was elected to the Royal Academy in 1853, presenting The Sleeping Model as his Diploma work. He has been described as the “greatest British painter of the social scene since Hogarth”.

About Creswick from Infogalactic:

Thomas Creswick RA (1811 – 1869) was an English landscape painter and illustrator, and one of the best-known members of the Birmingham School of landscape painters.

Feel free to click over to read more.

Website Changes

I took the past few weeks off from writing these posts and wasn’t sure if I would write any more of them. This series has evolved since I began it. What started out as a hope to encourage women in their homemaking and grow a supportive community slowly changed into more of a weekly blog entry for myself. A friend pointed out that these posts frequently contained multiple blog posts and she was right. So for the past few months I’ve been thinking about what to do.

In the end, I decided to move them permanently to being a kind of personal recap of what’s been going on in my home. I changed the series from “Simple Living This Week” to “In Our Cozy Home This Week” because it more accurately reflects what I’m writing in them. If someone clicked on the “Simple Living” category on this website, these are not the type of posts they would be looking for. So I moved this entire category to a subcategory under “Our Cozy Family Life” which is where I already put the more personal, bloggy type posts.

I may do them on Friday or it may be another day. My other purpose in changing them is partially no longer wanting to be tied down to a now arbitrary Friday deadline/expectation.

Publishing them on Friday doesn’t work well for sending out a newsletter either. It’s better to send a newsletter out on Sunday or early in the week. Friday is one of the worst times for many reasons. I’ve barely sent out any newsletters this fall and my plan is to do it weekly. So changing my expectations for the way I do these posts eliminates one mental hurdle regarding the newsletters.

Lastly, they take a lot of time to write and publish. By the time I source the artwork, write the post, and publish it, I’ve often spent a few hours on it. By the time I’m done, I don’t want to spend another hour or two composing a quality newsletter. Which leads me to the other reason why I’m making these changes.

Top Posts of 2022

I put the Top 22 Posts of 2022 in the sidebar. It was interesting when they popped up to see which posts and pages got the most traffic.

• What Was In The Envelopes At President Bush’s Funeral?
• Community Forums (in process of closing forums)
• Home Page
• Registered Nurse Nicole Sirotek Testimony To Senator Ron Johnson – The Horrors and Abuse of Covid Patients
• The Ultimate List of AIP Comfort Food Recipes
• Understanding “The Devolution Series” By Patel Patriot
• Why I Reject Minimalism
• Cozy Blogs I’m Reading
• The Cozy Life In America (and Why I Prefer It To the Danish Hygge)
• Classical Conversations Negatives And Why We Didn’t Join
• Occupational Therapy For Dysgraphia Or Writing Problems
• The Ginghams Paper Dolls (Free!)
• Online Art Classes For Beginners
• Free Printable Journal Pages
• Copywork Printables in Print & Cursive
• 100 Wholesome Books For Girls And Tweens
• Why I Homeschool In The Afternoon and Not The Morning
• Newsfeed 
• The Ukraine Situation Is Not What It Seems
• Free Printable Christmas Advent Calendar
• Free Printable Christmas Gift Tags
• 100 Field Trip Ideas for Homeschoolers {Free Printable}

The first one may be surprising to you, but it isn’t to me. The Bush funeral envelopes post is consistently one of the top two or three posts every single day. My post ranks as one of the top one or two results in multiple search engines for that topic. (Further proof to me that people are waking up and searching out the truth every day.)

The nurse one would have ranked much higher if I hadn’t unpublished it for a few months (long story).

The devolution post would be much higher if this were only the first half of the year. I consistently outranked the actual author of the series in the search engines for a long time. But when Google did a big update this summer, my post dropped and his content moved up. So that post doesn’t get nearly as much traffic as it used to. But for a long time, it was one of my most popular posts every day as search engines gave it lots of love.

Others were popular because they have done very well on Pinterest year after year or they rank very well with search engines.

In any case, it’s interesting to see what brings people here.

Have a lovely weekend!